Hawaii - Jeff Campbell [21]
Either option raises thorny, complex questions about who would be included and what land would be used. However, there are starting points for addressing both. First, the state of Hawaii holds in trust over a million acres of ‘ceded lands,’ which by law are to be used for the benefit of Native Hawaiians, in addition to the island of Kaho’olawe (Click here). Second, extensive Native Hawaiian genealogical databases already exist, since the separate dispersal of Hawaiian Home Lands requires that applicants prove they are at least 50% Native Hawaiian.
Today, with Hawaii-born President Barack Obama indicating his support, hopes run high that the Akaka Bill might soon be passed. For legislation updates, see the Office of Hawaiian Affairs website www.nativehawaiians.com.
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That same year, an even more important spark was struck: a group of Moloka’i activists illegally occupied Kaho’olawe (Click here), aka ‘Target Island,’ which the US government took during WWII and ever since had used for bombing practice. During a fourth landing/occupation in 1977, two Hawaiian activists disappeared at sea under mysterious circumstances, instantly becoming martyrs. After that, saving Kaho’olawe became a rallying cry, and it radicalized the nascent Native Hawaiian rights movement.
When the state held its landmark Constitutional Convention in 1978, it passed a number of important Native Hawaiian amendments, such as making Hawaiian the official state language (along with English) and mandating that Hawaiian culture be taught in public school. All these efforts led to a Native Hawaiian cultural revival, with a surge of residents, of all ethnicities, enrolling in hula schools, playing Hawaiian music, resurrecting the language, and rediscovering traditional crafts like lei-making and lauhala (leaf) weaving.
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The Hawaiian Independence website (www.hawaii-nation.org) is an excellent source for current news and information on the Hawaiian Sovereignty movement, with clear descriptions of the issues and links to many perspectives and voices.
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SEEKING A SUSTAINABLE BALANCE
By the 1990s, Hawaii was discovering the limits of its island resources. Its economy, now inextricably bound up with tourism, felt increasingly like a devil’s bargain. By 1990, seven million tourists arrived annually, and tourism contributed $10 billion. The state population had doubled since 1959, to 1.3 million, but still, on any given day one out of nine people on O’ahu was a tourist; on Maui, one out of three.
Hawaii’s unique environment and endemic species were being threatened by invasive species and loss of habitat, and off-island real-estate speculators and escalating housing prices were threatening to do the same to island residents, who couldn’t afford to live in paradise anymore. Hawaii had sold itself too well. And for the first time, no ready economic savior presented itself.
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The Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA; www.oha.org) posts up-to-date news and overviews of Native Hawaiian issues on its website, and publishes the monthly Ka Wai Ola.
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Further, in 1993, President Bill Clinton signed Public Law 103-150, which was a formal apology from the US government to Native Hawaiians for the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy 100 years prior. The apology gave new fuel to the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, a diverse collection of sometimes conflicting groups all agitating for Native Hawaiian self-government. The most high-profile effort that emerged was the Akaka Bill, which Senator Daniel Akaka first submitted to Congress in 2000 (Click here).
As Hawaii entered the 21st century, the state found itself seeking not yet another societal transformation, but a sustainable balance, one that preserved equally Hawaii’s diverse culture, its unique environment and its residents’ quality of life.
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TIME LINE
40–30 million BC Kure rises from the sea, appearing where the Big Island is today, beginning the formation